Tagged Questions

I am trying to maintain compliance with the Windows 7 User Experience Interaction Guidelines and I am having trouble in some dialog boxes with the rule that OK buttons should not have an access key ...

I am building an application that minimizes to tray on the close-button (cross upper right corner). I found two different behaviours for this kind of application now:
click on the tray icon to bring ...

In my UI, I have a normal text headline that covers a block of checkboxes. Without further information I'm scared of users not knowing what to do with the window. My idea is to put a tooltip in the ...

I’m working on a desktop application. Some of the menu items allow the user to enable or disable certain functionality in the program. There is some disagreement on how these menu items should work.
...

Is there any good UX justification for disabling the minimize button, but not the maximize or close buttons?
I notice that Eclipse (the IDE) has several dialogs that do this, and there are questions ...

In a desktop application, when you have an input text box that will get the value from somewhere else and that it might get updated, what's the best way to allow the user to edit that field to a new ...

I'm working on a Windows desktop application where the user deals with incoming calls by emergency devices. Because the inbound capacity is limited, the connections should be kept short, a time-out ...

I'm programming a small PC app which is mainly used to perform a set of sequential, step-by-step actions, and I wonder what would be a "standard" way to design its UI, so it would follow conventions ...

My team is creating an application that has a single entry point. There will be a single entry point, meaning only one item on the Windows 7 start menu/Windows 8 start screen. Other than "that's how ...

Nested scrollbars (a scrollable area within another scrollable area) present some unfortunate difficulties, mainly when scrolling trough them with the mouse wheel.
Whether such scrollbars are a good ...

I am trying to improve the interface of a tool.
Currently, we have 4 popup dialogs which all look the same and have the same functionality. They consist of a list and add/remove buttons and in each ...

If you delete something in Windows OS, it will go to Recycle bin. But if you think about it nothing recycles in it right?
Say, you delete a virus infected file and again restore it from recycle bin ...

When dragging the scrollbar using the mouse, the contents of the scrollpane move up and down as the bar moves with the mouse. But if you keep the mouse button held down, and move the pointer sideways ...

In Windows's window even if you don't hover on the close (cross) button it always stays red. But the minimize or restore button is transparent, if you hover then it will become blue.
So why does this ...

In the settings dialog of our Windows desktop application, the user can type or select a certain (template) file.
If nothing is specified, the application falls back to the default. This is indicated ...

Each train type on each section of track has a specific running time, set by Those Who Know.
My users need the option of modifying the value of that setting (train journey time in minutes) by either
...

I need some advice on the correct use of Ribbons in desktop applications. The program I'm working on is for a clinic, I have done a simple mockup below to make it easier to visualize.
My client wants ...

In Windows operating systems the taskbars default position is at the bottom. Why is that so? Especially it is strange to me because all windows application have their main menu bar at the top. To me ...

Every now and then, you'll have a bunch of desktop applications open in Windows. Let's say you have a word processor, a web browser, a music player, and video game open simultaneously. All of these ...

In my application a user can search for messages in a database. Users may select mailboxes and folders where the search will be performed. These folders are represented as a tree with checkboxes. But ...

A quick look through online search results show that the indeterminate checkbox state does not seem to be a very common UI interaction, yet Microsoft has persistently stuck with it and are probably ...

Browsing through a previous question on the usability between Windows and Mac OS, I thought an interesting question would be to see if there were any studies done on the impact of changing operation ...

I have been trying to gather objective feedback/response on the design of the Fluent UI ('Ribbon') interface. Apart from one study by Forrester which was commissioned by Microsoft anyway, and various ...

I have to make a help documentation in windows help file format. The amount of time I have got for this is ~ 5 hours and I have got about 50 pages (slides) that need to be added to this document.
So ...

Related to this question, it was proposed in the comments that it frustrates the user even more when when they go to shutdown their workstation and it takes forever to install updates. However, it's a ...